I’m honored to have been invited to attend the CALLALOO Literary Journal’s 2014 Writing Workshop hosted by the Black Cultural Archives, in collaboration with The Equiano Centre at University College London, England. I have a chance to work with esteemed poet Gregory Pardlo and be in residence with fiction writers Maaza Mengiste and Jackson Brown as well as 20 other multi-genre writers selected from across the global African Diaspora.

CALLALOO is a journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters based at Texas A&M University, and ranked one of the top 15 literary magazines in the United States by Every Writer’s Resource. Ranked among such periodicals as The New Yorker Magazine, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review, Callaloo is edited by Dr. Charles Henry Rowell, a professor of English, and published quarterly by the Johns Hopkins University Press in Baltimore, MD.

Unfortunately, CALLALOO is unable to provide funding support for the writers who are attending, so we are asked to pay our own transportation, room and board. Your individual support ensures my ability to attend this workshop, to further my artistic development and to collaborate with other artists from across the globe.

1) While in residence at the week long workshop, I will be continuing the development of my current poetry manuscript, “Anchoring the Compass”. This manuscript furthers the artistic exploration I began in my solo performance play, “Ungrateful Daughter: One Black Girls Story of being Adopted into a White Family . . . that aren’t Celebrities.” (awarded Zellerbach Foundation, James Irvine Foundation grants). This play examined my relationship to my Black and Filipino ancestry and the many historical secrets as a result of being adopted by white parents. “Anchoring the Compass” manuscript extends many of the themes I began to explore in my play, including the complexity of a hybrid, diasporic identity when one does not know one’s birth family history nor has any visible, mirrored link to a particular ancestral homeland. Many of the pieces in “Anchoring” explore how searching, speculation, story-making, mythology and invention all play a part in the development of the constantly moving, changing identities of adopted bodies. Reproductive justice, family preservation and the resistance to human trafficking are strong threads in this work.

Post workshop – I play to extend my trip for one week:

2) to continue my research on diasporic black adoptee communities. This research is a major part of the work that is informing my new play in development, “Side Effects”. “Side Effects” is a theater/ dance / visual art project that explores the personal and geopolitical impacts of inter-country and domestic transracial adoption on Black, Asian and multi-racial bodies of color. This multidisciplinary theater project speaks to the phenomenon of global adoption, and adds to conversations around concepts of multiple diasporas and the dispersal of bodies of color for white consumption, under the guise of multiculturalism and philanthropy.

3) to make connections to other adoptee artists working, writing and performing in London for potential transnational artistic collaboration.

Please check out my INDIEGOGO Campaign Here – share it with your folks who you know support writers, who support adoptee artists and who are interested in getting on at the beginning to support the development of my next multi-disciplinary play.

Your contribution goes directly to assist with airfare, room and board for the duration of the workshop and for the week of collaborative artistic meetings post workshop. Your donations also go to the percentages that Indigogo and PayPal take for fees.

Been missing my blogs that focus on adoption and race? Well I’m happy to share that I will be regularly blogging for the wonderful “Lost Daughters” blog about once a month. Please check out my first post with them – up today!

In other news – I’ve also been added to the Arts & Culture feature columnist list at the amazing Land Of Gazillion Adoptees Magazine! Look for my first article in Issue #3 coming in November. Yay!

Some upcoming work:

October 16th at StageWerx in San Francisco, I’m directing a new show with three new solo performers who are developing full length performances, “An Arab, A Showgirl & A Blonde…Walk into a Theater” featuring Lisa Kotecki, Kellita and amazing youth performer Rebecca Marshall. There are only a few tickets left so come out!

National Adoption Month is coming up in November – I’ll be available for a limited number of lectures, workshops, readings or Skype’s to your classroom, nonprofit or organization! Please feel free to email me directly regarding my speaker /workshop fees.

Friggin Sweeeet! I’m super excited to share with everyone I recently got word that I’ve been nominated for an Oakland Indie Award in the “Oakland Soul” category for my work with Third Root Art Collective and my activist work with UD and AFAAD. Yay! I’m honored that I can give love to Oakland and represent it with the love I feel for the Town.

As I’m still coming off the glow and gearing up for the madness that is ensuing from my acceptance into the NYC International Fringe Festival, I’m happy to say I’ve gotten a couple mentions in mags lately that I wanted to share. I was mentioned in this months edition of THEATER BAY AREA MAGAZINE, in an article by the lovely and talented solo master, Sara Felder. The article “Juggling the Truth” explores solo performance, truth telling and autobiographical writing for the stage. Here is a LINK to the whole interview online.

I was also just recently mention in Jet Magazine. I’m totally excited about this because Jet Magazine is one of the oldest Black magazines still in circulation. Its a brief mention, but yay!!

Since the CNN thing, I’ve found some pretty interesting analysis of the segment, but also a few newer folks who I think are doing some interesting thinking about transracial adoption.

Over at Womanist Musings, Renee has a great breakdown of her perspective of what happened with Dr. Walsh during the segment. I particularly liked the places where she attends to “hipster racism” and satire. As someone who produces comedians every once in a while, I get to see whats happening in comedy writing and how super sharp and conscious comedians of color are responding to this sort of ‘new’ way of talking about race that somehow ends up being just as racist as generations ago.

My favorite so far isn’t even about the CNN thing, but is Whitney Teal’s article, “Sandra Bullock, Transracial Adoption, and the Worship of White Motherhood”, an amazing analysis of the way white privilege and white womanhood can get conflated to replicate what, (if we believed everyone who keeps telling us that racism doesn’t exist, and if we would just stop talking about it it would go away) we would like to think are dated ideas about how the construction of white and black womanhood are created in opposition to each other and what that has to do with adoption and race. I love this analysis because i spent an entire chapter of my dissertation talking and theorizing about this.

Apparently some message boards and email lists are also discussing how crazy the segment was with the limited time, but also how interesting it was that the segment about TRA issues was put right before Soledad O’Brien’s special report “Rescued”, but there wasn’t really any attempt to talk about the Haitian children who are being brought to the US to isolated, all white places. sigh.